You can tell a lot about a nation by the names it gives its streets. Vainglorious, intellectual, utilitarian, cosmopolitan or pierced with regret for a vanished past, the national character betrays itself with artless clarity in its street signs.

Take the Spanish town of Candeleda, a settlement of some 5,000 souls roughly halfway between Madrid and Ciudad Rodrigo. It isn’t a grand place, but this paper yesterday printed a photograph of our oldest living former prime minister, Sir John Major, grasping the town’s newest street sign. In gloriously fancy scrolls of sky blue and canary yellow ceramic, it reads: “Avenida de John Major, 2013”.

The cricket-loving Sir John regularly spends his hols near Candeleda. A local councillor, Rodrigo Munoz, came up with the idea of naming the avenida in his honour, remarking that “he seems a very nice down-to-earth man who, although he doesn’t speak Spanish, can say the odd word”.

Accompanied by his wife, Norma, and flanked by a small party of dignitaries, Sir John – the very epitome of the Englishman Abroad in navy blazer, crisp checked shirt and natty yellow trousers – duly uttered the odd word (“Gracias”) and, amid beaming smiles all round, urged his fellow Britons to make the pilgrimage to Candeleda. After which, we may imagine, they all departed for a jolly good municipal lunch.

It has to be said that our old adversaries, the Spanish and the French, are much better than the Brits at naming streets after people. My elderly copy of Paris par Arrondissement heaves with the names of the illustrious (mostly) dead. Martyrs of the Resistance (Jean Moulin) and men of letters (Jules Renard), lend their names to the thoroughfares, alongside sporting heroines (Suzanne Lenglen), foreign leaders (Winston Churchill) and obscure 19th-century medics (Dr Potain, improver of the Malassez hemocytometer).

Until comparatively recently, to get your name on a British street you had to be, broadly speaking, an aristocrat or a tree. London’s street plan abounds with the names of toffs – Russell, Bedford, Clarence, Grosvenor – who owned swathes of the capital’s most valuable real estate; and of the native trees – medlar, cherry, pear – cut down to build it.

Our former leaders get a modest look-in – there is an Attlee Road in SE28, an Eden Way lurking somewhere in Bromley, while Churchill is more salubriously sited in SW1. But no Blair Boulevard, no Thatcher Terrace and certainly no Sarkozy Street or Merkel Mews.

A report in this paper from 2010 records a drift in the direction of multiculturalism, with a scattering of new addresses such as Khadija Walk in Lewisham, south London, named after the Prophet Mohammed’s first wife, and Sustainability Way in Leyland, Lancashire. But while the prevailing inclination may be towards rebranding Mulberry Drive as Mary Seacole Close, the old wishful pastoral of suburban street names proves surprisingly tenacious.

Twenty years ago, when I dwelt in an unlovely bit of Camberwell, I was always vaguely cheered by the fact that some unknown Edwardian developer had perversely decided to name a couple of dull local streets after the cream of the Shire hunts – the Quorn and the Pytchley.

But then, you could say that I have a particular interest in dull local streets, since I am descended from one. In 1901, my dear grandfather was found as an infant in Chalton Street, NW1, just behind St Pancras Station, and named after it by the local Mr Bumble. It is a bleak and featureless thoroughfare, but whenever I pass the street sign, I still feel a faint stirring of the proprietorial emotions that must animate the breast of Sir John Major when he glances up at the magnificent blue and yellow swirls that proclaim his very own avenida.